Prompt Lookup Tables

Lookup Tables are a very powerful part of the application. Three quick examples:

• You work with inbound services companies in several countries, and want to remind your agents about them each time they look at flights to one of these countries. You simply create a lookup table with the country code for each of the countries, and then another column with the message you want to display. The third column could be the URL for the inbound services company. You can then build a single Prompt that displays the message whenever there is a flight availability command to one of the countries. When the message is clicked, the appropriate website is launched.
• You have an extensive hotel program and want to remind your agents which hotels to book in each city. You can create a lookup table with the airport/city code in one column and your message in another. Create a prompt that looks in this table every time a hotel availability command is sent, and displays the message for that location.
• You want to make sure your agents know about special deals that are frequently changing. You create a lookup table with the location, date range of the deal, and message to display. Whenever agents look for flights during the specified date range for each location, your message will be displayed. You can edit the lookup table as often as you like, and within an hour all of your agents will have the updated messages.

Start by clicking Lookup Tables. You will see a list of existing Lookup Tables. Click Add to add a new one. We'll use the inbound services example. Enter the name and description. You can add up to 15 columns or fields, with up to 5 each of Text, Date and Number data types. It is important to specify the correct data type so that the application can make the proper comparisons when lookup up information in the Lookup Table.

In the example shown below, we added three Text fields (note that shortly "String" will be replaced with "Text"). The field names we entered were "Country Code", "Message" and "URL". Note that "LT_" was added to the beginning of each name, and spaces were replaced with underscores. This is done because the field names are later used as variables, so they need to be formatted properly. The "LT_" at the beginning ensures that the names do not conflict with any other variable names.

Note: Once you put data into a Lookup Table or select it to be used in a Prompt, you cannot change or remove the existing fields, but you can add new ones.

When you edit the data in the lookup table, our screen works just like a spreadsheet. You can copy and paste the Lookup Table information as well, so you can maintain the data in Excel, Open Office Calc, etc., and then just paste it right into our screen. This way you have complete control over how you maintain your data. You can also copy the data from our screen and paste it into Excel (it currently does not paste properly into Open Office Calc). Open Office is an office suite with components that are compatible with Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but is free. You can learn more at http://www.openoffice.org

In the above screenshot, there is one row of data in our Lookup Table. Click Add Row to add a new row, and then fill it in. You can resize the columns by dragging them wider, just like in Excel or Outlook.

Note: Once you finish editing the data, you must click Save!

"ALL" Variables

Often there can be more than one match in a lookup table. For example, if you have a lookup table with the traveler name in the first column and unused ticket data in the second, such as:

In the above table, the name SMITH/PAT has two unused tickets. If you search in the table for SMITH/PAT, in a Notification Window you can use LT_Ticket_ALL to display all the match data from the LT_Ticket column. You can append "_ALL" to any lookup table variable to display all the matching data in a notification window.

If you want to combine the _ALL variables from multiple columns and have them line up, such as showing the above Name and Ticket columns, use LTCOMBINE, as in:

LTCOMBINE({LT_Name_ALL}, {LT_Ticket_ALL})

Note that LTCOMBINE must be in uppercase, and you must have the parentheses and braces like you see above. This is available in Build 219 and later.

BookingBuilder Technologies
PO Box 112
Mahopac, NY 10541
845-234-4440 Fax: 212-202-7914
E-mail: info@bookingbuilder.com